Let me ask you a question.
Imagine two options sitting right in front of you. Option one, you receive $100,000 right now. Option two, you receive $1,000,000 in five years.
Hearing those two choices, most people immediately pick the second one. But when faced with similar choices in real life, they quietly pick the first one anyway. Why? Because most people simply do not know how this concept of long-term thinking actually applies once real life gets involved.
I used to listen constantly to podcasts featuring people like Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos. They all preach the same thing. Think long-term. But honestly, that phrase never really landed for me. So I decided to dig deeper into what that sentence actually means in practice. Today I want to walk through my own practical methods for actually executing long-term thinking.
Frame the Time, Not the Goal
The first method is to think in long time frames.
The easiest way to understand long-term thinking is to set your timeframe first, not your goal. Most people do the opposite. They set a goal first. But when you set the time first, the scale of the goal shifts to match it, and your daily actions transform along with it.
Here is an example using YouTube to make this concrete.
Picture two YouTubers. YouTuber A decides to get results within one month. The moment you trap yourself inside a one month window, your options shrink fast. You have almost no choice but to chase whatever trend happens to be hot right now. Next month, and the month after that, you are just chasing fads and pumping out the same generic videos everyone else is making.
YouTuber B decides to get results in five years. With a five year horizon, there is zero reason to chase current trends, because today's trends will be completely gone by then anyway. Instead, this creator starts hunting for a topic they can sustain for years and eventually do better than anyone else on the planet. Building real expertise, establishing a brand, becoming the obvious authority, that becomes the actual goal. The first three months can simply be spent exploring and experimenting to find the right topic.
Both of these people want the exact same thing, success as a YouTuber. But the time frame they choose completely reshapes what the goal even looks like, and that reshapes everything they do every single day.
The Power of 78 Subscribers
So what kind of time frames did the most successful YouTubers actually use? Extremely long ones, unsurprisingly.
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| True growth begins long before the numbers show it |
Take MKBHD, currently the top tech review YouTuber in the world. By the time he finished his first 100 videos, he had exactly 78 subscribers. He just kept making those first 100 videos on the exact topics he genuinely loved. Today he has 20 million subscribers.
Hearing that story might make you think, so you're telling me to just grit my teeth and survive that brutal stretch of time? Absolutely not. That is something only a rare few can pull off through sheer willpower alone.
Long-term thinking always traces out a J-curve. To survive the dip at the bottom of that curve, you need cash flow first.
Building Your Own Survival Mechanism
Take Samsung Semiconductor, currently one of the biggest semiconductor companies on the planet. They acquired Korea Semiconductor in 1974, but did not turn a profit until 1988.
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| Long-term goals require short-term safety nets to survive |
The reason they survived that brutal 14 year stretch is simple. The entire time, a sister company under the same umbrella, Samsung C&T, lent them funds, built their semiconductor fabs, and made massive investments on their behalf.
Just like Samsung C&T, you need something that generates cash flow to support your own long-term goal. You have to build a structural safety net that actually lets you think long-term in the first place.
In plain terms, your long-term goal should have nothing to do with your basic livelihood. Only then can you stay steady and look toward the future instead of panicking about the present. If MKBHD had bet his entire income on YouTube with no other source of money, the despair of having only 78 subscribers after 100 videos would have either forced him to quit or pushed him into making the exact kind of trend chasing content he was trying to avoid.
Decoding the Technological Paradigm
The second method is reading technological trends correctly.
Understanding how a technological shift will reshape the long-term future gives you a massive edge on its own. Some of you might be thinking, didn't you just say not to chase trends? But you have to carefully separate a passing fad from a technology that fundamentally rewrites the rules of business. These are two completely different things.
The Internet, for example, went far beyond being a trend. It permanently reshaped entire industries, and the companies that failed to understand that simply fell behind and disappeared. Borders, the massive American bookstore chain, filed for bankruptcy in 2011, and it is widely reported that their failure to respond to online book sales and e-readers was the core reason.
Meanwhile, one company understood that exact same shift and became the largest company in the world. Amazon. In 1994, Jeff Bezos had absolute conviction that the internet would transform entire industries, and based on that conviction alone, he quit his job and started his company.
When Bezos founded Amazon, the public reaction was cold. People genuinely said, "Who buys books on the internet?" But Bezos had conviction. Amazon endured seven straight years of losses, a brutal long-term stretch by any measure, went all in on the internet, and is now one of the largest e-commerce companies on Earth.
The Ultimate AI Leverage of 2026
I genuinely believe AI is exactly that kind of technological shift right now in 2026. I suspect most of you reading this already agree.
So how will this AI shift reshape the solopreneur landscape, and how should solo entrepreneurs like us actually leverage it for the long haul?
I believe AI will eventually handle everything except essential human judgment and planning. And the fastest way to maximize your own capability is to hand off everything except that judgment and planning directly to AI.
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| Work like a hero or toil like a laborer, the choice is yours |
Here is a simple example. Picture one person writing an article who has fully delegated grammar checks and research to AI. Now picture another person doing every single piece of that manually. Between the two, who can focus more deeply on the actual substance of what they are writing? Obviously the person who offloaded the grunt work to AI.
By running everything else through AI, you can immerse yourself completely in the planning and judgment that actually drives your business. This is exactly why people keep saying that in the AI era, you need to focus on the essence of what you do. Paradoxically, automating with AI is what lets you focus purely on that essence without burning yourself out on the rest.
So even if it sounds a little extreme, I genuinely believe that if you are a solopreneur, you need to delegate nearly every repetitive task to AI as fast as humanly possible.
These two methods are simply what I have personally learned and felt around long-term thinking.
If you are building a business, set your goals with a genuinely long time frame. But remember, if you bet your entire livelihood on it, your mind will stay anxious, and you will not be able to survive that stretch of time. You absolutely need a safety net built underneath you to make it through that period, even if that means working a part time job in the meantime.
And when setting those big goals, always keep technological trends in mind, and hand off everything non essential to AI.
As time goes on, people will split into two clear groups. Those who used AI, and those who did not. And I am completely certain the gap between those two groups is going to be enormous.
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